Review by Choice Review
Field Museum anthropologist Sharratt's book is an annotated and heavily illustrated catalog from an exhibition of 100 chuspas (hand-woven personal coca bags used throughout the Andes) from the collection of the American Museum of Natural History. She discusses the remarkable consistency in design, construction, and use of the chuspas from prehistoric times to the present, pointing out how an individual chuspa often served social and communicative functions, revealing specific regional, ethnic, social, and linguistic details about the identities of its owner. Sharratt emphasizes the intersection of textiles and coca leaves, both embedded in Andean culture for practical, spiritual, social, and symbolic reasons, which the author enumerates. Where Andean textiles are widely viewed as the culture's highest form of artistic expression, coca has become a contested subject, raising international, political, and ethnocentric issues focusing on the illegal trafficking of cocaine to the West. Sharratt's straightforward, multifaceted, and detailed history and analysis of the chuspas also tracks the political history of coca. The book's last part introduces the transformation of the chuspa from its long history as a coca bag into a widespread and growing item of tourist art, documenting the contemporary manufacture and use of the chuspa as a generalized indigenous item to be sold to tourists. --Phyllis Passariello, Centre College
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
